Cincinnati Art Museum welcomes 21c to Cincinnati

Have you noticed that the Cincinnati Art Museum is
becoming a pretty exciting — provocative, even — place lately, edgy and
with a sense of experimentation, rather than stodgy and risk-adverse?

The next bold move in shaking things up is The Way We Are Now: Selections from the 21c Collection, nowon view in CAM’s Schiff Gallery through May 15.

The exhibit’s very existence shows the museum can respond
quickly to opportunity — shows often are scheduled a year or more in
advance, but this one was announced just a few weeks before it opened.
Louisville’s 21c Museum/Hotel, owned by contemporary-art collectors
Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, is planning to open a branch in
Cincinnati (downtown in the old Metropole Hotel), so it’s definitely
timely. The show was curated by William Morrow, 21c’s museum director.

The exhibition, of about 70 pieces primarily made in this
century, shows ever more clearly that CAM wants to be a major player —
along with 21c and the Contemporary Arts Center — in presenting
contemporary art in Cincinnati.

“This is the first one we’ve done with 21c, but hopefully
there will be others,” the museum’s Chief Curator James Crump says. “As a
curator looking at resources in this region, in terms of collections
one might eventually borrow from for exhibitions or (working) together
in a joint-venture fashion to acquire works or put shows together, this
is something I’m interested in.”

The museum’s 21c show is similar in theme and even title to CAC’s recently concluded Where Do We Go From Here? Selections from La Coleccion Jumex,
in that the international artists are out to poke, probe and confront
you with their ideas on politics, race, identity issues, sexuality and
repression.

And that they do. The video known as “Oh Mickey” by
Mickalene Thomas, an African-American artist comfortable in various
media who probes issues of identity, beauty and the role of gender in
art, is hard to miss. In the middle of one gallery wall, it consists of
an African-American woman nude but for striped athletic tube socks and
red evening shoes, standing in a room that has a 1970s-urban look.

The
“Oh, Mickey” chants — from the old Toni Basil hit song — are interrupted
by a voice (Thomas’?) making comments like “You don’t understand.”

See many more photos from the exhibition here."Oh Mickey" by
Mickalene Thomas

It’s sort of a taunt, but directed toward whom? Wall text
informs us the piece is modeled on Balthus’1933 “La Toilette de Cathy,”
in which a fully dressed man sits comfortably, perhaps invasively, as a
nude woman passively prepares (with her maid’s help) her hair. I’d say
Thomas’ piece (one of three of hers in the exhibit) is about “shifting
the gaze,” empowering the nude woman in art to look and talk back to the
artist and the viewer to avoid male idealization.

But it’s also personal, maybe even nostalgic. With
wood-paneling, print upholstery and bold pillows, the room is a
remembrance of the kind of places the artist knew growing up in Camden,
N.J.

“I find the work very brash, very forward, very
provocative,” Crump says. “She’s interested in not only how
African-Americans have been perceived or represented in art but how they
perceive themselves today.”

If The Way We Are Now has a signature piece, it
would be “Fat Bat” by the French artist Virginie Barré, a sculpture of a
rather portly costumed superhero (who looks a lot like Batman)
suspended with aircraft cable over the walkway outside the gallery. Made
of acrylic resin and leather, it’s cute and playful, but it has a bite
to it that signals the piece as something more than mere Pop Art
celebration.

“It is a provocative piece in its own right,” Crump says.
“Perhaps we see it as less (of that) because it’s so funny. But what
she’s trying to do is show us what a superhero in our own age would look
like, and I think it’s also from a French perspective.

“So to me it’s kind of a critique of American obesity and
the reach of American capitalism, with large corporations like McDonalds
or Starbucks opening storefronts throughout Western Europe and
certainly France. It’s a superhero probably well-intentioned but one who
is overweight from too many donuts and American fast food.”

There are plenty of other pieces with a blunt political
dimension. Dave Cole, a U.S. artist, has “Memorial Flag,” which is an
American flag comprised of 18,000 red, white and blue toy soldiers. It’s
a troubling image, turning the flag into a kind of death mask. The flag
seems like sticky flypaper upon which the soldiers are stuck. And it’s
made more sobering by the fact the piece’s dimensions match those of
flags draped over the caskets of veterans.

Among some of the other politically charged pieces are American artist Al Farrow’s “Study for a Mosque Reliquary” and“Menorah
VI,” both of which are sculptures made from steel, guns and bullets;
Peruvian artist Jota Castro’s “Homeland Security,” made of steel and
razor wire with three big gates on wheels, and Austrian artist Werner
Reiterer’s untitled work, a green barrel marked “laughing gas” that
releases some kind of emission into the air. I saw few people sniffing
it, a comment on our politically paranoid times.

Among the photographs, three from Elena Dorfman’s series
of silicon sex dolls and their human companions are especially striking.
The dolls look so real. In “Rebecca 1,” a man lowers his head to one of
the dolls’ chest as “she” looks blankly forward, lips as red as beets.
Is some kind of evolution going on here?

Crump comments, “You can get really close to the surface
of the picture and still ask yourself, ‘Is that what it is?’ People with
plastic surgery and body augmentation look more and more like dolls. I
was asking myself, ‘Is it in fact a doll or possibly human?’ ”

THE WAY WE ARE NOW: SELECTIONS FROM THE 21C COLLECTION is at Cincinnati Art Museum through May 15. Buy tickets, check out performance times and get venue details here.